By Digital News Asia April 6, 2017

AKAMAI Technologies, Inc on March 4 announced the company has entered into an agreement to acquire Soasta, a provider of digital performance management.

The acquisition is intended to give Akamai customers greater visibility into the business impact of their website and application optimisation strategies. The all-cash transaction is expected to close early in the second quarter.

“Akamai has long been associated with delivering exceptional technology solutions for optimising web and mobile application performance,” explained Akamai Web Performance and Security senior vice president and general manager Ash Kulkarni.

“The addition of Soasta’s technology is intended to give our customers new ways to measure, optimise and validate the business impact of their web performance strategies.”

Through its acquisition of Soasta, Akamai plans to add several new capabilities to its Web Performance Solutions portfolio. Akamai customers will have improved ability to accurately measure how real users experience their applications, and how that experience impacts their behaviour.

This will help customers prioritise and implement the most impactful performance optimisation strategies to positively affect business outcomes.

Through Soasta solutions, Akamai customers will then be able to test optimisations at scale prior to deployment and validate the business impact of those optimizations once they are live in production.

The result is a comprehensive set of cloud-based performance and business outcome optimisation solutions.

“As important as web and mobile site and application optimisation is to online businesses, the ability to truly understand the result of those optimisation strategies is crucial to continued success,” stated Soasta co-founder and CEO Tom Lounibos.

“This acquisition will provide Akamai customers, many of whom are already Soasta customers, with a new way to measure and test the optimisations they are making to their sites, and validate the actual business impact of their site’s performance.”

Soasta, headquartered in Mountain View, California, is a privately funded company. The closing of the transaction is expected to occur early in the second quarter of 2017.

The company expects the Soasta acquisition to be slightly dilutive to Akamai’s non-GAAP net income per share for FY 2017 in the range of US$0.06 to US$0.07 and to become accretive in 2018.